A tale of two cities

Do you ever get that creeping feeling that the enemy is within the gates, camouflaged and ready to strike?

The worst human problems are the ones that feature “an elephant in the room,” or some fundamental deficit that’s so obvious no one talks about it and thus it gets forgotten, until it explodes.

This is why we assume children have some knowledge we do not: in addition to humiliating control rituals that undermine self-confidence and replace it with reliance on society (toilet training, sexual propaganda, high school, peer pressure) we normally absorb taboos that keep them from seeing the elephant. Before that time, kids have relatively clear — albeit unstructured and inexperienced — consciousness.

Our modern elephants are easy to spot, but hard to articulate, because every facet of our society has arranged itself around not seeing them.

We break into a lot of big ones here at Amerika, but here’s the biggest: view of ideal society.

Individualists. “I put up with your dysfunction, so that when I am dysfunctional, you are compelled to let me do what I want to do.” This is the ultimate chant of the sociopath who, having learned the direct approach is too obvious, goes for an indirect, passive-aggressive approach. Demands for “rights” and “freedoms” and socialistic guarantees of income are essentially an extension of this impulse. The individual comes first, before all else, and especially before the consequences of their actions that do not have a social impact, e.g. looking “not nice” in front of one’s friend group.

Realists. “I am one small part of a complex world, and within it, a human hierarchy where I serve a unique role and through that, benefit indirectly.” Instead of making their approach indirect, these make their reward indirect. They are most focused on figuring out what will produce the correct result according to a complex rubric that is both social and ideological. Realists like having a social standard, or abstract set of goals and values, which they can use to compare with their own planned actions. From this, they can predict results, both social and consequences in the physical world, and so be sure of the success of their efforts. The goal of their socialization is not the self, but the self having a place where it is necessary, and thus “nice” or something better — trusted.

When you see the usual self-congratulatory babble spill out of the liberalized media, it’s important to remember that they are selling a product. Most of the people who spend a lot of time consuming news are leftist-biased or unconsciously approving of such bias, and so they eat it up with a gilded spoon:

Individuals who call themselves liberal tend to have larger anterior cingulate cortexes, while those who call themselves conservative have larger amygdalas. Based on what is known about the functions of those two brain regions, the structural differences are consistent with reports showing a greater ability of liberals to cope with conflicting information and a greater ability of conservatives to recognize a threat, the researchers say. – Science Daily

Keep in mind that paragraph quoted above was not written by the scientists, but by journalists hoping to sell papers. But later on:

Still, Kanai cautioned against taking the findings too far, citing many uncertainties about how the correlations they see come about.

“It’s very unlikely that actual political orientation is directly encoded in these brain regions,” he said. “More work is needed to determine how these brain structures mediate the formation of political attitude.”

That’s right: we don’t know which way cause goes in this. Either people with these traits pick their political outlook based on their strengths, or their political outlook defines their approach to life, and thus what parts of their brains are in full use.

A cynic could say that leftists, who live in an internally-conflicted ideology, might need a bigger portion of their brains to deal with conflicting information because none of their political outlook makes rational sense.

More practically, we can see how the different outlooks shape these mental states. Those who look out only for themselves are accustomed to using social double-talk to manipulate others; those who are realists, and want to fit into a social structure, are more interested in figuring out how not to fail. The first group has no standards, thus no real context of “failure” except in the sense of “party foul, dude.”

America and Europe are divided, as the West has been divided for a thousand years, between these two models.

Do we become individualists, and let society become a shopping mall in which we enact our desires through commerce instead of culture?

Or do we choose culture, and a collective goal, so that we know when we do the right thing — not the popular thing, not the “unique” and “different” thing, not the manipulative thing — we are rewarded?

The current, and perpetually recurring, confrontation is only symbolically about “spending.” Public programs flow from policies. Policies flow from partisan ideologies. Ideologies flow from political philosophies. So long as the question of whether we are a society, a national community as Franklin Roosevelt believed, remains contested, so will budget wars continue carried out by factions waving one banner or another mostly decrying the evils of government.

Thomas Jefferson wanted our government to do only those necessary things that individuals could not do for themselves. That is quite a large territory. It includes transportation systems, public safety and judicial systems, public education, and national security, among many other undertakings. The real confrontation is over the social safety net constructed between the age of Roosevelt and the age of Johnson. Overwhelmingly, the American people wish to maintain this safety net. They simply do not wish to bear its costs, nor do they wish to accept its demise, which would involve taking our grandparents back into our homes.

In a perfect world we would have a great debate throughout the nation, not just in Washington, over the issue of whether we are a society, a national community, and, if so, what role we wish the national government to bear in maintaining that community. Alas, we do not live in a perfect world. So we let our elected officials struggle over budget cuts that are but symbols of our deeper dilemma and our unresolved definition of who we really are. – Huffing Post

The Jeffersonian model is society which has a culture and goals, therefore doesn’t need government to step in as a kind of surrogate parent.

The Roosevelt model is a society which has no culture or goals, but exists to take care of its citizens so they can pursue their individual pleasures. In this model, society is the parent cleaning up after the ensuing mess.

I mean, individual pleasures are fascinating for a little while, but at some point, we crave something deeper out of life. Unless we’re vapid, that is.

The political consequences are that the Roosevelt model leads to a total state, where the Jefferson model does not necessarily do so. Liberating citizens means a huge amount of social chaos as they flail around looking for a path, a center, or an inarguable goal, but find none. Nanny State, totalitarian state and “freedom” anarchistic state merge into a big playground which requires a powerful government to stop fights and clean up litter.

There are, for our thousands of political theories, only these two basic outlooks because they divide on our relationship to society.

Does society exist for us?

Do we exist for society?

Or, do we and society both collaborate on a goal?

The first two are similar in that they suggest means before ends. There is no goal, thus either society or the individual must be master, and they fight it out. Nominally, they exist as the poles of anarchy and totalitarianism, but the two inevitably cross over because totalitarianism creates internal lawlessness, and anarchy creates a need for law and order. These two categories suggest the Individualist point of view, since the question of society hinges on its power relative to the individual. It is a competition.

The third is the interesting one that corresponds to the Realists and Jeffersonians above. It is a collaboration: society and individual working together, not as means before ends, but as means to an end — that, in one of those weird logical twists that makes sense only after time thinking about it, can include a maintenance of its means as one of its primary goals. If you want a society without chaos, without domination by chaos or government, and one in which you have a guaranteed social role, this is it.

Much as occurred in France in 1789, the the USA in 1865, Russia in 1917 and Europe in 1945, we are currently trapped in fighting the split between these two basic outlooks: Individualist, or Realist?

The individualists portray themselves as egalitarians, but as saw above, that’s an indirect method of manipulating others toward selfish goals:

Three propensities account for many, and probably most, people leaning towards egalitarianism of a vague, ill-defined kind.

The simplest and most visceral is envy, the desire to see the “tall poppies” cut down to size and deprived of the good things of which they have such an outrageous excess. The envious is satisfied if the rich are deprived of the good things they do not deserve, but he does not count on these good things to be handed over to him. In this sense, envy is selfless, yet demeaning and therefore not openly avowed.

A different propensity, on the other hand, is the selfish one of looking for material gain from an egalitarian move. A society’s mean income being above the median signifies unequal distribution. Convergence of the mean toward the median potentially increases all below-average incomes ; those with incomes below the median gain in any case, and those with incomes above the median but below the mean benefit if the egalitarian move takes the form of cutting down the excess of incomes above the mean and redistributing this excess only. Intermediate solutions that cut partially into incomes below the mean but above the median, as well as into the ones above the mean, would still leave a majority of gainers and a minority of losers. A majority would naturally tend to be egalitarian, subconsciously convinced that the equalising move would work to their benefit. A belief that the good of the majority is somehow the same as the “common good”, a belief that is no less widespread for being grossly arbitrary, reinforces the egalitarian propensity.

A third egalitarian propensity is less evidently at work, and its very existence is open to dispute. Most evolutionary theorists contend that the conditions of life of wandering hunter-gatherers for at least a hundred thousand years imposed the equal sharing of irregularly obtained food in the extended family or group as the best survival strategy. The wandering life and the unpredictability of finding food, as well as the limited techniques of preserving surpluses for rainy days, promoted the survival of people inclined to share food. Their genes were selected for survival over the genes of the non-sharers. Present-day populations carry the same genes and hence have an egalitarian propensity. – The Library of Economics and Liberty

As the 20th century fades in the rearview mirror, tolerance for the false altruism of egalitarian beliefs shows itself. It had been lying dormant, since to suggest any “anti-egalitarian” action was viewed as admitting that you were not a nice person, were not educated, had no social or business prospects, would not be socially accepted and thus, would fail at life and die alone. Underneath all the happy “tolerance” propaganda was an ugly and hateful threat of ostracization, which bullied other people into joining the egalitarian herd.

However, in the first decade or so of this new century, we’re seeing positive changes:

The producer of the show Midsomer Murderswas sacked after he said that his show was all-white because “We just don’t have ethnic minorities involved. Because it wouldn’t be the English village with them. It just wouldn’t work.” Backlash from the public was far less vitriolic against him than it would have been in the past; after all, he said nothing bad about non-whites, only that Englishness was defined by white Englishness.

Leaders in France, Germany, England and the USA expressed doubt about diversity working, or declared that it had already failed. While they chose to interpret “diversity” as lack of assimilation of minorities, the attitudinal shift was so great that a statement which would have been political suicide seven years later was accepted calmly into the news.

In France, England and Germany, nationalist candidates presented a serious threat to the established order at the polls. In the United States, libertarian Ron Paul attacked federal entitlement programs including pro-diversity ones, and the expected outrage fizzled.

Things are changing. Why haven’t we seen a resurrection of white nativist interests in American and European politics?

Something more serious holds back Southern nationalism: Its support is limited almost entirely to people who profess a certain kind of politics, whereas national movements must be beyond politics. An independent South would need the support of people who may not be conservative, who may not be suspicious of big government, who may not be Christian, who may not oppose marriage for homosexuals, but who are still devoted to the South. The roots of a Southern nation would have to spread widely and not just sink deep.

…

I don’t know about my class-mates but I remain sympathetic to secession. I would be glad to see an independent South—or an independent Vermont or Texas or Cascadia. I applauded the disintegration of the Soviet Union, as much because it meant independent homelands as because it signaled the death of Communism. Today, I root for the Chechens against the Russians, the South Sudanese against the Arabs, the Kurds against the Turks, the Flemings against the Walloons, the Quebeckers against Toronto. Men need homelands that are theirs, that commemorate their heritage and ensure its survival.

But when the Czechs and the Slovaks peacefully seceded from each other, it was because millions of people were Czech or Slovak nationalists first, and many different things second. They set aside all other disagreements in the name of nation. – VDARE

Hunter Wallace sees a more direct form of dysfunction among those who claim to be working for nativist interests:

There is a common thread running through all of the above: “whiteness” alone is a pretty weak source of identity.

“White people” are not a nation. “Whitemanistan” is not a state. If you ask White Nationalists to describe their nation-state, they can’t even tell you its name and location. Every White Nationalist group has its own flag and opinion on that subject.

The myths have to be created from scratch. They are still on the drawing board because there is no real substance to this identity. Just the scaffolding.

There is just a generic abstract model, a fantasy world, created by a few obscure intellectuals that appeals to various types of alienated people on the internet – Walmart cornflakes.

Most of these people have little else in common. They are not related by blood or culture. They don’t share a common history. The only thing that White Nationalists really share are grievances and abstractions.

That is probably why they spend most of their time fighting with each other. They don’t have what it takes to get this idea off the ground. – Occidental Dissent

Ferdinand Bardamu points out that “white nationalism” obstructs anyone who is interested in being pro-white from getting anywhere near that term:

Familiarity breeds contempt, and whites hate each other way, way more than they’ve ever hated any minorities. It’s been like this ever since the fall of Troy, nevermind the protestations of Nordicists and other pan-European ideologues to the contrary. People who love to wax dramatic about tribalism seem to forget that the strongest tribal hatreds are between peoples in geographic proximity – meaning that different tribes of whites, blacks, browns and yellows hate each other FAR more than they hate the “others.” The Quebecois want out of Canada, the Scots want out of Britain, the Flemish want out of Belgium – need I go on? I have nothing in common with Germans, Greeks or Australians aside from skin color, so why should I care about them? Even in America, the spooks and spics are just pawns in the long-standing war between whites. If the average Vermonter was given a button that would kill everyone who voted Republican, he’d jam his fist onto it until every bone in his hand was smashed to bits. And the average Southerner would eagerly see all the “Yankees” and liberals gassed with Zyklon-B long before he’d get around to the wetbacks and negroes. If you’re expecting these people to overcome centuries worth of hatred in pan-racial unity, you’re insane. – In Mala Fide

Elaborating on that, Jef Costello at Counter-Currrents points out the brutal underlying truth:

I relish little opportunities to slip something into the conversation to make her think. Usually it consists in unfurling a bit of my colossal pessimism – my sense that everything is going to complete and utter hell. On this particular occasion she listened to me for awhile and then said, wearing a look of grave concern, “Are you happy?”

The question took me by surprise and I did not want to answer it. The honest answer, of course, is that no, I am not happy. But I didn’t want to say this, and for a variety of reasons. First of all, I knew what she was up to. She’s one of those people who think that if your outlook on the world makes you unhappy, something must be “wrong” with your outlook. My mother used to try the same jazz on me. I did reveal the full extent of my political incorrectness to her, and it made her worry. She was afraid of my being ostracized, and also of my views making me unhappy. And my mother had a simple solution to this: change your views. I patiently tried to explain to her that I could not just “change” my views like I change my clothes; that to simply refuse to see the things that I see would require a kind of self-delusion and intellectual dishonesty of which I’m not capable. But she’d just stare at me with that look that demands accompaniment by chirping crickets. It was like we spoke two different languages.

If I had simply said to my friend “Yes, I am unhappy,” she would have counted this as a victory of sorts. “You see,” she would say, or want to say, “You see what your sort of thinking leads to?” – Counter-Currents

A major problem that we face is that our fellow citizens exist in a reality-free zone.

They apply oblivion in order to stay personally “happy,” and while it doesn’t work, they’re made so afraid of alternatives that they cling to it.

Let me reveal a secret: the “white nationalist” quest is part of a larger one.

Postmodernists, most liberals, most conservatives, all Traditionalists, most environmentalists, etc. agree: our society is in a downward spiral of decay, rotting from the middle outward because it lacks a true center.

This isn’t news. It wasn’t news to T.S. Eliot or Ernest Hemingway; it wasn’t news to F.W. Nietzsche or Arthur Schopenhauer; it wasn’t news to Plato or Aristotle. Societies decay when they lose sight of a goal in common, or a center. Then it becomes every person for himself or herself.

There are many reasons I am not a White Nationalist. First, it’s too limited of a philosophy; it reeks of special interests. Second, I don’t trust its “solutions,” which offer a list of what to remove but no list of what to construct. Finally, I don’t like its method, which is to try to appeal to populist anger — mainly because this method fails, since the mainstream parties do the same thing AND offer free money.

Everybody knows, on some level, that this system is moribund. That democracy because it’s a question of what people want to believe, not what experts know, always destroys a good thing. That judgment is not distributed uniformly, and that most people should have nothing to do with politics. That the more regulations we pass, the more opportunities for corruption we create. That inequality is endemic, and that the healthiest societies are homogenous. These are things we whisper but believe with all our hearts in our vulnerable moments in the dead of the night, at funerals, or as we fix our hopes on a beloved person alone in a distant city.

White nationalism by all accounts should be succeeding. Yet sixty years later, it’s not — what’s succeeding are mainstream nationalist politicians, but even they are just barely cracking into success. What’s holding us back?

The loudmouths. In their desperation to have “numbers,” or a count of warm bodies coming through the door, white nationalist leaders tolerate all sorts of defectives. It isn’t as simple as saying “it’s the skinheads,” because the defectives come from all groups: angry basement-dwellers, insane elderly, violent survivalists, frustrated homosexuals, you name it. Broken people are attracted to simple polarizing ideologies with no chance of success because these are suicide analogues. Ever single white nationalist forum, publication or gathering is dominated by mentally-unstable loudmouths who scream dogma at anyone trying to offer a successful plan. The loudmouths don’t want success. They want to be important, and the best way to be important is to make yourself a big shot in a hopeless but noble endeavor. That’s what they saw on the TV, and that’s what they’re acting out because the rest of their lives are a shambles.

You have no plan. Nationalism isn’t rocket science. You want non-Europeans removed. Great, and what else? The budget, social issues, and other deep conflicts rending America and Europe? We need workable plans here that don’t alienate our people for being Christian, atheist, liberal, Jehovah’s Witnesses, etc. This plan does not need to be radical; in fact, we do better with small steps toward a long-term solution (stable) than with sudden vast moves (unstable). But we need a plan, and a platform, beyond race.

You have rejected the majority. And they will reject you as a result, and you’d do the same to them if the roles were reversed so don’t whine about it. Instead of trying to find a radical political movement, and claiming everyone else is wrong and horrible, find some commonality. These are your kindred and they’re just… um… temporarily resting their minds with some easy lies. They need your faith and help at this difficult time.

Scope. You are addressing surface political issues in a society that has had its soul ripped out. How will we reconstruct culture? Our cultures may not be exactly identical, but we can agree that the great Western European success stories — England, Germany, The Netherlands, even France — have more in common than not. In the USA, we have a nativist English-German culture that works quite well. You will need to adopt and enforce some culture like that, and while the neckbeards and moonbats out there will whine about the enforcement, the fact is that right now someone is enforcing culture on them; you’d just be upgrading the quality level. How will we fix our environmental issues without sabotaging business?

The usual. From above: “First, it’s too limited of a philosophy; it reeks of special interests. Second, I don’t trust its ‘solutions,’ which offer a list of what to remove but no list of what to construct. Finally, I don’t like its method, which is to try to appeal to populist anger — mainly because this method fails, since the mainstream parties do the same thing AND offer free money.” We don’t need Racial Marxism from a white special interest group. We need a group working toward the betterment of humanity through whiteness, or some variant thereof.

Eternal infighting. The FBI must just be having a field day. It’s so easy. You bicker like small animals, turn on each other and backstab and inform, and among you are those who cannot control their own habits. They’re easy to turn against each other, turn into informants, and make a den of thieves of the whole mess. The infighting over trivial issues crushes us.

The hate. Saying that African-Americans and Jewish-Americans (or European counterparts) are somehow a demonic force attempting to destroy us is equivalent to the political babble “they hate our freedom.” You’ve found someone to blame, and you may be justifying it by claiming that it will bring in more warm bodies, but to paraphrase a silly movie, these aren’t the warm bodies you are looking for. You want the American middle class. They don’t like hatred. Saying that diversity is broken and cannot be fixed is a winner; trying to find some group to blame, and to prove that diversity is bad that way, is a loser. People see you as a bully.

The love. So what do you want to see? What is the grand vision? If you were Fuehrer tomorrow, what would you create? Where’s the praise of great architecture and music, art and literature? How would you turn this society around and make it positive? Environmental renewal, space travel? These are big empty glaring blanks on the White Nationalist scoreboard.

More from Bardamu:

White nationalism is multiculturalism for the melanin-deprived, obsessed with blaming everyone except those actually responsible for the white race’s predicaments, and doomed because of an adverse demographic profile. Short of a massive re-write of the battle plans, it’s going to end up like Pan-Arabism, another racial ideology that bombed because “Arabs” from Morocco to Qatar had jack all in common and wanted nothing to do with each other. And far too many of you are spiteful jerks who are more obsessed with hating non-whites and nurturing your Turner Diaries fantasies than loving your own people and actually trying to help them.

I disagree with his interpretation about the degree of Nordic civilization in the past (stated elsewhere in that article), as clearly antecedents existed of a high cultural evolution for at least 8K years previous, but that’s not the point. The point is that he’s right here: white nationalism is too narrow of an ideology, and as a result, it has no practical plan and will end up becoming dogma without physical results.

Which, if you look over its history, is what has happened so far.

Europe and the USA are poised to hand power to the first person who says, as gently as possible, “diversity doesn’t work,” and then comes up with an alternate plan that doesn’t involve hurting people. They will also need to have a full political platform, but that can easily be borrowed. In fact, such a person is certain to come from a major party, as voters view those as more accountable.

Even more, other ethnic groups will support this vision so long as it is phrased as an end to diversity and not an attack on them:

The new narrative comes from the ethnoburbs, a term coined in a 2009 book by Arizona State University professor Wei Li to describe entire cities dominated by a nonwhite ethnic group. They are suburban in look, but urban in political, culinary and educational values, attracting immigrants with advanced degrees and ready business skills.

Monterey Park, just to the south of here, is considered the first suburban Chinatown. And with 61,571 people, it’s much more than a “town.” Now there are eight Asian-dominated ethnoburbs sprawling through a 25-mile stretch of the San Gabriel Valley. Here, you’ll find one of the largest Buddhist temples in the hemisphere, and a string of Boba drink shops, often called the Starbucks of the valley. (Boba is a drink flavored with small tapioca balls.) – NYT

White nationalism has failed. Mainstream conservatism has failed by not integrating the sane parts of white nationalism into its platform. This unity will only occur when we make these philosophies grow up, and answer the difficult questions (instead of the easy, dogma-laden ones) in order to find a better future for ourselves.

Even more, it has failed by not resolving the individualist-realist struggle in our society. Decline occurs when people give up on having a center. This struggle is bigger than whites, or nationalists; however, it requires not just nationalism, but cultural unity, and not just for whites — for everyone.

It’s about the soul of humanity. And we should participate, not just for ourselves, but for the future of a promising species.

Excellent analysis of the current state of white nationalism. I’ve thought that WNs are quite hostile to anyone who isn’t white, as well as whites who don’t believe in their cause, and thus they are confined to a fringe movement.

I never met a White Nationalist who wasn’t a paranoid “THE ZOG ARE CONTROLLING US” type of person.

At the very least, too many believe in ZOG or the Great African-American conspiracy (GAAC) as the source of our downfall, when it’s clear the decay is within. In addition, if one really felt ZOG controlled the world, I guess the last thing one would do would be to publicly criticize ZOG. Better to get power behind the scenes than to try to reveal the mysteries of the Elders of Zion. Further, while it’s healthy to find a place for blame, anything but blame on an abstract idea — liberalism, individualism, materialism — leads to more infighting and less strength. Good point.